


Liking Someone in "N" Steps

by Voidromeda



Category: Starfighter (Comic), Starfighter Eclipse
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fluff, Love at First Sight, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21904357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Voidromeda/pseuds/Voidromeda
Summary: Cain doesn't "like" people. That just doesn't happen.
Relationships: Cain/Helios (Starfighter)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15
Collections: Starfighter Secret Santa





	Liking Someone in "N" Steps

**Author's Note:**

> This is my secret Santa gift for Chrysonoe! I hope you enjoy it! I really liked writing this ^^;

“Have you heard of the new Fighter joining us?” is what Cain hears the moment he takes a proper step outside of his room, no longer being burdened with the duties befitting of him as a Fighter – which is mostly a lot of menial shit. He looks over his shoulder while he ruffles his hair with the shitty, sandpaper towel the Alliance uses, watching two other Fighters murmuring and talking amongst themselves about the newbie who is going to be joining them soon.

Guy Number Two, as Cain aptly names him in his head, takes a swig of his water and then makes a face of sucking sour lemons before he then says, “yeah, what about him? He’s just a Fighter, isn’t he?”

“Well,” the first speaker, Guy Number One, twiddles his thumbs for a few moments, looking distracted and tired in a way that every Fighter in this fucking ship does, Cain included, before he then continues on saying, “I heard he actually took the Navigator test – and he was from the colonies too! The colonies! Can you believe it?”

The second speaker almost drops his water bottle upon hearing that and even Cain’s movements slow down upon hearing that declaration. There aren’t a lot of colony fighters who can boast that much smarts, or even attempt to bluff such a thing; anyone who asks a basic question about maths or what-have-you will immediately reveal the lacking education that colony members suffer from.

“No shit.” Guy Number Two says, surprise clear in his voice. “Why the fuck’s he a Fighter then? If he had the balls to do it…”

Guy Number One presses his indexes together, grunts, and says, with clear bitterness, “he was half a mark off the minimum passing rate. Guy was rejected on that, and they wouldn’t round the score up either. Can you fucking believe it? A fifty-nine-point-five is what stopped the guy from getting it.”

“I wouldn’t have even scored ten!”

Neither will have Cain, but he keeps that tidbit to himself. He tunes the conversation out once the two begin to drift off and talk about their own mundane shit, things that Cain has no interest in hearing. His hair drips with cold water that drag down his neck and slip underneath his top. He goes back to fluffing his hair up with the cheap towel, trying to dry it as quickly as possible before the first round of training and practice begins.

He has to look his best for Abel in the end, after all. Don’t want to offend the fucking princess.

* * *

Coming alongside the Fighter is, unsurprisingly, a new Navigator. He looks as posh and as difficult to approach as every other fucking Navigator in this place, and he smiles at Cain with iron in his teeth and silver around his eyes. He plays nice to Abel near immediately, shaking his hand and smiling so brightly to the point that it feels like someone has sewn his face into that shape. Distrust creeps in across his veins, numbing him from the inside and unfurling outwards. He chats Abel up, talking about useless things back on Earth that the Martians will never know about – of fairs and universities and colleges, of degrees and all the nice, fancy things that someone like Cain will never get to have.

“Have you met my Fighter yet, Abel?” the new navigator asks – Selene, as pretty as he is, with his gradient-dyed hair and his eyes as gentle as a little lamb. “I think you ran into him outside, when the ship was docked earlier?”

Abel claps his hands together, face brightening up and looking far too pleased, “yes! I met him. He was very precious, but also seemed extremely anxious. Poor guy. I hope you and him get along well.” he looks away from Selene to instead gaze over at Cain, with that wide-eyed doe look, as though he is a wolf that is going to pounce Abel and gut him from the inside out and eat him still warm and bleating.

He looks away.

* * *

The new Fighter is impossible to find. When he asks Selene after running into him, he shakes his head and tells Cain that ‘Helios’ isn’t in their shared bunk. When he goes around asking people for whether or not they have seen the new Fighter, everyone shrugs or shakes their heads. He walks along the Fighter section of the ship, moving past the many, many rooms dedicated to isolation and the few that lead to different training simulators. There is one door dedicated to the sparring room, only one, and all the Fighters are assigned turns in when they can use the room. It is inconvenient and annoying.

It is the way the world works.

Helios is in none of the rooms open to Fighters, and he doubts that he is already locked away for isolation. He doesn’t hear about a Fighter causing trouble from Encke, and he knows whenever stirs something up – Fighters talk among themselves, but then hush up around Navigators. Even Encke, as dutiful to the Alliance as he is, follows that unspoken rule: what happens amongst kin, stays amongst kin.

He crosses his arms, taps his foot, and growls under his breath. Where the hell can he be? He turns around, slips out and away from the Fighter section, walks over to where Navigators do all of their shit, and then passes by every door that has access restricted to only Navigators. There are many things that they can do that Fighters cannot, which just makes the presence of the latter more of a nuisance than an assistance. All things that Cain doesn’t know about and never will.

The door to the library, however, is not access-restricted. It slides open with a simple press of his palm. It is a small area, filled with seats, a table, and very few terminals to borrow books from and read for the duration of a person’s stay within the library. There are tablets available for those who do not bring their own so that the person may tap it on the terminal and borrow their reading material of choice.

In the middle of the room, sitting in a curled up fetal position with his hands gripping his tablet almost desperately, sits someone Cain has never seen before. There, surrounded by technology and pristine white is a person who stands stark with his unflattering shades of gray.

There, looking intensely at his tablet and sometimes tapping on it, sits Helios.

“Hey,” Cain barks out and Helios immediately jolts up and presses his tablet to his chest, eyes wide and frightful, his face flushing from being seen, “you’re Helios, aren’t’cha?”

He swallows and doesn’t answer.

“Oi, I’m not gonna rat you out or whatever. S’not like you’re gonna get in trouble. Are ya Helios, or not? The Fighter who coulda become a Navi?”

Helios casts his gaze downwards, back to his tablet, and he nods shyly. Cain strides over to him and flops next to him onto the sofa, the seat bouncing a little underneath him, and he leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. He spreads his legs and bumps against Helios, who looks over at him with questions dancing in his small, pretty eyes. He lets his arm dangle over his knees while looking over at Helios, and something… odd surfaces in his chest.

“What’cha reading?”

Silence rings golden amidst all the copper and magnesium. Helios’ breath gets stuck in his throat and he looks at Cain, as though looking for confirmation, anything to tell him that he isn’t playing with him. He shifts and manoeuvres himself so that he is leaning closer to Helios and his arms are no longer hanging loose on over his knees; instead, he supports the weight of his chin onto his palms and gazes into Helios’ eyes.

“Um,” he stutters out, his voice so soft and sweet, unlike the rough gunpowder grind of Cain’s own one or the raspy, hoarse sputter of Deimos’ throat, “I’m… actually reading an e-book on astrobiophysics – one, one of the simpler ones, until I can get to the more convoluted texts, and…”

Even though Cain can’t handle a single second of Abel trying to tell him any of his technological shit, Helios speaks slowly and carefully, yet with so much enthusiasm that Cain ends up sitting there the entire hour just listening to him speak.

All he wanted to do was to tell the guy to leave Abel alone.

* * *

Helios, he learns, is a pushover – if Cain barks at him to come over no matter where he originally wants to go, then Helios will turn on a dime and trail after him like a lost if not curious puppy. He flinches almost always whenever Cain orders him, so he starts to lower the amount of growling and demanding he does of him and instead focuses more on just asking him frankly. He just grouches at him and asks Helios to do mundane things such as help him with his weights, workout with him, spar with him, and sometimes he just asks Helios to let Cain join him and go to the library with him.

He doesn’t get a single fucking thing that the wannabe Navigator tells him, but Cain angrily finds himself unable to separate from him. Deimos takes to Helios rather well despite the fact that it is always the mousy bastard and him alone who always stands next to Cain. He doesn’t seem that perturbed with the introduction of the little fidgety puppy who yelps and flinches at every single little thing.

It is on a day where it’s Helios’ turn to train, where he and Deimos are busy drinking vodka that Cain pilfers while playing poker given to them by the techies, that the little mousy bastard signs at him a simple question. He puts his cards down to be able to make gestures with his hands: three fingers up, two across, pinky and index, pointer finger, a fist, and so on until he has his question done. Cain snorts, says, “when’re you gonna teach me RSL instead, ya buffoon? Also, I’uhno. I’m keepin’ an eye on him.”

Deimos raises his eyebrow. Cain presses the tip of his tongue against the back of his upper front teeth, then clicks it at him and gives Deimos the middle finger.

He loses the poker match because Deimos is as emotional as a brick.

* * *

Helios is prone to falling asleep in places that people don’t often go to; such as the library, the second supply closet far up in the Fighter section that has been emptied out but never locked, isolation room number five with the broken door that no one cares to fix… he learns to search those areas when the library – despite being one of the places Helios naps at – is void of him. The first time he sees Helios asleep with his tablet on his chest, mouth slightly open and drool sliding down the side of his lips all while his chest rises and falls slowly, Cain is hit with the need to wake him up. A desire to slap his cheek and scare him to the waking world.

Instead, he sits next to him, leans back against the sofa, and just stares up at the ceiling while Helios dozes next to him. He remembers Abel telling him about a blanket he has hidden away in the library before he completely gives up on reading anything there. He gets up, carefully, as to not wake him up, and scours around for the hiding spot that Abel mentions that one time. Just that once.

Helios wakes up to an empty library some twenty minutes later, with a blanket draped over him and the tablet set in front of him on the little table. He rubs at his eyes and looks around, trying to see if anyone else is here. Far away, outside in the hangar bay, Cain smokes underneath his ship and stares up at the see-through protective dome to take in the stars that glitter above.

* * *

Cain is, despite what people may believe, prone to developing new habits just as easily as he discards them. If he doesn’t want to have a certain habit, he will just ease it out until it is completely and utterly gone. Abel tells him that that explanation is utterly fucking insane, which is the first time he hears him sputter and swear in disbelief. That almost never happens. He also doesn’t know why it is so unbelievable that Cain just… decides not to do things.

Whatever. Fucker can believe whatever he wants. He can get rid of habits just as easily as he gets them.

He has a new habit, anyway; he waits at the door to the mess hall, arms crossed and eyes staring directly ahead of the hallway until he catches a peek of Selene and Helios, with the latter looking uncomfortable while Selene talks animatedly to him about something. The pretty little navi puts a hand on his shoulder, Helios smiles sheepishly, and something in Cain boils.

“Hey!” Cain barks out and Helios looks up, not wincing or jolting backwards in surprise anymore at the harsh grate of his voice, and he smiles wider, sweeter, and waves at him. Embarrassingly, Cain’s hand comes up on near-instinct to wave back. He quickly curls his hand into a fist and tries not to look away. “Sit with me.” Cain says and Selene looks back and forth between the two of them.

He opens his mouth to ask a question. Helios laughs and stops Selene immediately. “Yes, okay.” Helios says, a smile on his face. “Yeah, let’s sit together. Let’s suffer through the mess hall food together today.”

Cain snorts.

Selene sits down with the rest of his Navigator entourage, all while stealing glances at them. Cain, under scrutiny, drapes an arm around Helios’ shoulder and tugs him close so that his boasting is unavoidable. Helios snickers.

He doesn’t know what sort of face Selene is making right now.

* * *

“Are you okay with not bein’ a Navigator?” Cain asks while Helios is reading something – a computer science book that he admits to Cain he doesn’t really care for but is reading nonetheless – and Helios stops, his finger hovering above his tablet. “S’why you’re studyin’ and readin’ so much, right? To retake the Navi test?”

Helios’ finger shakes. “Maybe,” Helios says, “they let you retake it as much as you want, right? So maybe I’ll try again.”

“Yeah?” he rolls a cigarette between his fingers – unlit, because Helios doesn’t like him smoking in the library, but he chews on the end of it regardless – and he huffs, “you’d prob’ly succeed and become the first Martian Navi. You’d make history, Helios.”

“Mhm hmm.”

He shoves the cigarette in his pocket and then reaches up to ruffle Helios’ short hair, distracting him from whatever thoughts he may be having – he has seen that face on Deimos as kids before, an expression that indicates when the little mouse is just mere seconds away from crying. Helios looks up at him.

“You’d do great.” is what Cain says.

Helios leans into him the moment he removes his hand from his hair and he tenses up. Helios goes stiff as well. Cain closes his eyes, counts to ten, then he reaches over and wraps his arm around Helios, tugging him even closer. They sit like that, with Cain eventually letting his arm drop so that his hand is resting on Helios’ hip while he reads, and he doesn’t know how long time passes. What is probably an hour or so feels more like just a few minutes too short, just not long enough for Cain to process what he is doing.

He kisses Helios’ forehead.

* * *

“You know, it’s strange.” Abel says that night while Cain is curling as far away from him as possible, “normally on nights like this, you fuck me. You always initiate, all hungry like.” he sounds curious, prodding. Cain tries not to curl even further into himself from the question. “You haven’t been doing that for a while now, actually.” Abel continues to point out, sounding too nosy for his own good.

Cain slams his fist onto the floor in front of him, pain blooming as bright as a flower underneath the midnight moon and the sound echoes in the back of his head. Abel yelps in surprise. “Don’t worry about it.” Cain says.

It ain’t nothing for Abel to think about, anyway.

* * *

Helios likes to hold hands. He does it whenever he sees Cain and immediately grabs his hand and intertwines their fingers, holding onto him tight. Cain always gripes at Helios, but he is the one who chases his hand whenever the other lets go. His grip is even more bruising than Helios’, though he always relaxes his hold whenever he sees actual pain on the other’s face. He makes sure to shut the other Fighters up real quick whenever they start snickering and sneering whenever they see the two of them holding hands. The Navigators are more confused than anything else, but they know better than to say anything and Cain knows better than to start shit with the prissy, white fucks.

Selene stares at their hands for too long.

He makes sure to bring their hands up so that he can kiss Helios’ knuckles when they pass by Selene.

* * *

Helios lets Cain come over to his bunk, especially when he learns about the state of the latter’s. Selene is never there due to the heavy workload he has, Helios tells him, and he is almost always lonely. “It’s why I’m never in here when everyone tries to find me,” Helios says apologetically while he sits on the bottom bed and Cain is sitting on the floor, his back against the bunk bed and sitting right next to Helios’ legs, “but you looked for me anyway.”

He grunts, not really wanting to justify that with an answer. Cain rolls his unlit cigarette between his fingers. He has stopped chewing them when Helios expressed concerns for his health over them, though he mostly rolls them around in between his fingers just to keep himself busy. Helios, undeterred by Cain’s response, keeps going, “I’m surprised you liked me.”

“I don’t like you.” Cain grouches. “I ain’t about that.”

Helios laughs and reaches out for his hand, the one rolling the cigarette around, and Cain immediately drops it just to wrap his fingers around Helios’. His hands feel much smaller than Cain’s. He is, in general, much smaller than Cain. Something bubbles underneath his chest, the need to hold Helios in his arms and never let go, to chain him up and away from every fucker and bitch who wants to mess with Helios. He knows better than to do that.

“Sure, you don’t like me. I don’t like you either.” Helios says playfully, before he then bends down to kiss the top of Cain’s head. Just before his lips land, he turns his head around, arcs it, and catches Helios’ soft lips with his own.

His heart is beating far faster than Cain is okay with. Helios looks surprised, eyes wide, shy. “Oh.” Helios exhales gently, looking surprised yet so very happy. That is their first kiss. For some reason, that thought makes him feel warm.

They don’t let go of their hands until ten minutes before Selene is coming back; Cain separates from him then, gives him another kiss – small, gentle, as soft as a feather when Cain is normally as rough as granite.

“I’ll find you ‘gain, don’t go wonderin’ somewhere I can’t find ya, stupid.”

Helios smiles disappears behind the doors sliding shut. Cain bows his head down, rubs and scratches the back of his neck, and he huffs. He shoves a hand in his pocket while the other arm just hangs listlessly by his side.

Yeah.

It isn’t only just ‘like’. Like is too small a word.

Yeah. It’s something else.


End file.
